// BBC WORLD NEWS — MONDO
Who is Lula? From ex-worker and prisoner to Brazil's president again
Even for a veteran politician like Lula, uniting a divided nation will be a challenge
On the face of it, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has done the impossible one more time - within three weeks he overturned defeat in first-round voting to gain re-election as Brazil's president.
It was no mean achievement for a man who before his first successful run at the post in 2002 had tried three times unsuccessfully.
When he became president in 2003, he came to office as the first leftist leader of Brazil in nearly half a century.
Now aged 80 and with plenty of experience at governing as large a democracy as Brazil, he has bucked the trend of electoral victory for right-wing leaders in Latin America whose policies mirror that of US President Donald Trump.
Lula's first presidential victory in 2002 marked the end of an unprecedented journey from poverty.
The son of a poor, illiterate peasant family, Lula worked as a peanut seller and shoe-shine boy as a child, only learning to read when he was 10 years old.
He went on to train as a metalworker and found work in an industrial city near São Paulo, where he lost the little finger of his left hand in an accident in the 1960s.
Lula was not initially interested in politics, but threw himself into trade union activism.
Elected leader of the 100,000-strong Metalworkers' Union in 1975, he transformed trade union activism in Brazil by turning what had mostly been government-friendly organisations into a powerful independent movement.